


let's be electric (like we've been before)

by moriann



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 19:46:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moriann/pseuds/moriann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being on the road with Steve again is stirring up memories, but it’s nothing like the last not-quite-roadtrip they’d been on, even though once again it is HYDRA they’re hunting down. This time, it’s not parachuting in or hopping trains, but a rental car and solid roads ahead of them, and the terrible motels Steve has an odd fondness for are a world apart from an overnight camp pitched in enemy territory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let's be electric (like we've been before)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



> Many thanks to Luna for the beta. Title from FoB.

SHIELD has sent them to check out a report of HYDRA activity near Redding, but they were too late, the facilities abandoned days ago. Bucky wonders whether Nick Fury knew they wouldn’t find anything more than empty corridors and hastily packed up labs and sent them on a wild goose chase anyway, just to get them away from the Helicarrier. Neither of them is in a hurry to go back, so they report in and set off to follow the trail the rushed relocation must’ve undoubtedly left.

Being on the road with Steve again is stirring up memories, but it’s nothing like the last not-quite-roadtrip they’d been on, even though once again it is HYDRA they’re hunting down. This time, it’s not parachuting in or hopping trains, but a rental car and solid roads ahead of them, and the terrible motels Steve has an odd fondness for are a world apart from an overnight camp pitched in enemy territory. 

–-

Utah, Nevada and Arizona pass in a blur of monotonous landscapes and forgettable small towns. They take a meandering road through them, following whatever clues they can find or get from SHIELD, feeling more and more like they’re chasing long-gone ghosts, and during the long hours in the car, it seems that they spend more effort pretending they’re alright than thinking about the job at hand.

At nights they stop at another motel and Bucky can sometimes almost see Steve’s control crack, because it’s hard to keep up the pretence when you're living out of each other's pockets, but he can never quite figure out what to say. It’s another reminder of the time before, when all of the Commandos were plagued by the horrors of the war, but they've all pretended to hold it together. Now, over half a century and thousands of miles away, he was still laying awake in the middle of the night, unwilling to go back to sleep and face the nightmares, and watching Steve sleep instead. If he concentrates he can pretend that it is ‘44 and they’re on a train somewhere between Breslau and Stettin, an interminable ride through the middle of nowhere between two HYDRA bases. Or even longer ago, before the war, in New York, when they would sometimes hop a train and travel upstate, huddled together and watching the landscape change outside the freight car; back when they were still naive enough for the future to seem bright and full of promise, and think they had all the time in the world to figure it out.

Bucky wonders if the history is doomed to repeat itself – how bad the fall will be this time – and doesn’t say anything.

–-

By the time they hit Albuquerque, he’s sure no one is under any illusion that they will come up with any leads on HYDRA’s activity, but they still call in to report their utter lack of progress.

‘I’m beginning to think it might be an elaborate plot cooked up by SHIELD’s shrinks,’ he says. ‘Make us talk to each other, at least, just to combat the boredom.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Buck. I’m always perfectly candid and open in those sessions,’ says Steve, and in the grin accompanying the words Bucky can almost see the kid he used to know before the war. He tries to grin back, wondering if his own masks are as obvious as Steve’s are to him, but this brief moment of rapport seems to loosen something. 

‘How about we take advantage of staying in a city for once and get some take out?’

That night, they fall asleep leaning on each other, sitting back against the headboard on Steve’s bed, and all of it, eating Mexican take out, watching a baseball game on the tiny TV in their room and heckling the Yankees, the easy camaraderie, all of it feels like something he could get used to. He still gets woken up by the nightmares, but it's easier to snap out of them, to reorient himself, and instead of getting out of the room he takes a few deep breaths, makes himself relax, lets his eyes drift shut again and it feels like a small victory when he manages to get back to sleep.

–-

Somewhere between Wichita and Tulsa, Steve turns off the road to stop for the night at a motel that causes Bucky to spend a few minutes in horrified silence, staring at the building.

‘This is some twisted revenge for me making fun of your appalling taste in motels, isn’t it? Because I’m quite sure those three colors were never meant to exist, Steve, never mind be put together.’

‘I don’t know, I think it goes splendidly with the neighborhood, especially the Christmas lights in April decor of the diner next to it.’

‘I vote you lose the motel-picking privileges. I’ve travelled through Eastern Europe in the mid-nineties and I have never seen anything this disturbingly gaudy.’

Steve snorts.

'From what I remember, the last time you were the one to pick our accommodations was back in ‘43 in Poland, and that was the last time because you almost got caught by the Germans and we had to scramble to keep you from getting too closely acquainted with the guillotine they had built in front of the local jail.'

He shifts towards Steve and opens his mouth, ready to blame that whole mess on Dernier, but he gets a good look at Steve’s face and even in the dim light of the motel’s neons, he can clearly see his eyes are crinkled and there’s an amused smile on his lips. He freezes for a moment, and the words never leave his mouth, because that might just be the first time he’s seen Steve relaxed and genuinely happy since they’ve started out. He finds himself smiling back instead, despite the morbid joke, because just hours before, it seemed impossible that this easy friendly banter would manage to sneak up on them, that somehow they’re still capable of it, even though he doesn’t quite trust himself yet and Steve still looks despondent about being stuck in the future more often than not.

–-

Some nights, when it gets to be too much, he gets out of the room and sits out front until he can calm the panic and the bone-deep terror his memories bring. They’re in a motel somewhere on the outskirts of Cleveland, in a non-descript part of town that probably didn’t even exist the last time he was in the country, and he leans against the wall and slides down it to the floor, wishing that he was still foolish enough to believe that downing the bottle of whiskey the liquor store across the road could provide would bring even a short respite from this demons.

He hears the door to their room open behind him, and feels Steve sit down next to him. Bucky turns his head to look at him – because that’s what he’s always done, because Steve has always had this effect on people, this magnetic pull that, at the very last moment, turns out to be the flame to your moth and you realise you'll burn but it's nowhere near enough to make yourself stop. It’s 3 a.m. in an unremarkable motel in the middle of a road trip to nowhere, and it’s maybe poor timing, but it feels like something is finally about to change.

‘It’s occurred to me that, for all your talk, if I wait for you to make a move, we’ll be stuck in this limbo for a very long time,’ says Steve, and then he leans over, with that determined look in his face that has always been Bucky’s favorite. It all but telegraphs the kiss that comes next, and it’s probably terrible idea, but those were always Bucky’s forte and he was great at making the best of them, so he opens his mouth and lets himself have this, however ill-advised it certainly is, because he’s already spent one lifetime looking but never touching.

He's too much of a realist to think that there's any truth to _love conquers all_ , but maybe it's another variable that will cause change, maybe if they change enough, the ending will be different this time. But even if the history is doomed to repeat itself, they might just as well do this, tangle it up some more, because if they're hurling towards a fall anyway, there's no point in not taking what they can while they’re still able.


End file.
